Dozens of Bay Area tech employees vow to never build a Muslim registry

Updated 1:58 pm, Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Many of the tech business leaders who opposed Donald Trump's candidacy during the election are preparing to meet with him as President-elect. Jim Cramer expressed his hopes for the event by quoting Pope John XXIII and calling for "Pacem in Terris," which translates to peace in our time. Cramer predicts that Trump will bring up the issue of hiring American workers and make the case for moving factories to the U.S. When it comes to the meeting Cramer says he hopes for an olive branch and not a fight.
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Dozens of employees at a number of major tech companies in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area are stepping forward to pledge to never build a Muslim registry for the U.S. Government, should President-elect Donald Trump ever push for one.

Workers at companies including Slack, Google, Stripe, Uber, Wave, Autodesk, Etsy, and more have all signed an extensive pledge stating that they will "advocate within their organizations" to minimize data collection that would help any kind of "ethnic or religious targeting," to "demand legal process" in the event the government seeks to acquire such sensitive datasets of information, and even to destroy datasets that may pose a risk to future targeting of this kind.

The public pledge was posted to the website neveragain.tech, and was created by "engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people." Around 30 people worked on the text of the online document.

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This February 20, 2015 file photo shows the Google logo at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Google announced June 24, 2015 it was teaming up with university scientists to use its computing platform to accelerate efforts in genomics research. The US tech giant said it was joining with the Broad Institute of biomedical and genomic research, a project of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AFP PHOTO / SUSANA BATESSUSANA BATES/AFP/Getty Images

This February 20, 2015 file photo shows the Google logo at the Google campus in Mountain View, California. Google announced June 24, 2015 it was teaming up with university scientists to use its computing

Dozens of Bay Area tech employees vow to never build a Muslim registry

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Specifically, the group outlines the following:

- We refuse to participate in the creation of databases of identifying information for the United States government to target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin.- We will advocate within our organizations:- to minimize the collection and retention of data that would facilitate ethnic or religious targeting.- to scale back existing datasets with unnecessary racial, ethnic, and national origin data.- to responsibly destroy high-risk datasets and backups.- to implement security and privacy best practices, in particular, for end-to-end encryption to be the default wherever possible.- to demand appropriate legal process should the government request that we turn over user data collected by our organization, even in small amounts.- If we discover misuse of data that we consider illegal or unethical in our organizations:- We will work with our colleagues and leaders to correct it.- If we cannot stop these practices, we will exercise our rights and responsibilities to speak out publicly and engage in responsible whistleblowing without endangering users.- If we have the authority to do so, we will use all available legal defenses to stop these practices.- If we do not have such authority, and our organizations force us to engage in such misuse, we will resign from our positions rather than comply.- We will raise awareness and ask critical questions about the responsible and fair use of data and algorithms beyond our organization and our industry.

As Buzzfeed points out, the pledge was issued one day before Trump plans to host tech CEOs and executives at Trump Tower in New York, including Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Tesla's Elon Musk, Google's Larry Page, and more.

Earlier this month, Twitter replied to an inquiry by the Intercept asking whether they would, in any instance, assist the U.S. Government by supplying private user information to facilitate the creation of a Muslim registry. In response, the San Francisco tech company stated that they would not, and reiterated that one of their company policies is a complete prohibition against the use of "Twitter data for outside surveillance purposes" by outside developers.

Other Bay Area tech organizations, including Google, Apple, and Facebook, did not respond at that time.